25 July 2014

The media portray Israel as an all-white colonialist state. What’s the real story?

ByNathaniel Zelinsky

Mainstream-media
outlets in the West love to run photographs of Palestinians, typically
looking sympathetic in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. On the rare
occasions when editors include photos of Israelis, the images bear a
striking similarity to one another: All the people in them are white.

In
reality, Israelis — including thousands of soldiers in the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) — are not uniformly white or even Jewish. Consider
the commander of the Golani Brigade, one of the country’s elite infantry
units, currently fighting in Gaza as part of Operation Protective Edge.
Colonel Rasan Alian is an Arab Druse who has served in the IDF for over
two decades. Recently wounded in the eye and hospitalized, he returned
to the front lines as quickly as he could to lead his men. In Alian’s
own words,quoted in the Israeli press, “I want to go back to Gaza, and get to as many terrorists as possible.”

Do you find it intriguing that an Arab abhors Hamas and has spent
20 years of his life defending the Jewish state? Well, CNN doesn’t. Its
investigative journalists prefer to malign Israelis as “scum.” Apparently Rasan Alian just isn’t a compelling story.

Or
what about Chief Warrant Officer Baynesian Kasahun and Staff Sergeant
Moshe Malko, two of the Israeli soldiers tragically killed in combat?
They are both black. In fact, peruse the entire list of those who have given their lives to stop Hamas’s reign of terror. There is a lot of diversity there.

From all the photos in the New York Times over the past decade, you would never know that more than 125,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel,
and many of them have served in the IDF. Or that, in addition to the
Druse, large numbers of Bedouins volunteer to join the Israeli army,
even though they are exempt from conscription. Or that Israel and the
IDF boast Jews of Middle Eastern descent.

Instead, much of the
Western media carefully “whitewashes” images from Israel to give the
impression that Israelis are all of European heritage. Why? Because
whitewashing fits the post-colonial narrative the Left applies to
Israel. In that mindset, the Jewish state is the “colonizer/occupier,”
and the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank are the “natives.”
If IDF soldiers have the same skin tone as British imperialists or
Christopher Columbus, the template is that much easier to apply.

Whenever
the global Left sees a white Israeli guarding a checkpoint in the West
Bank or fighting in Gaza, it knows what moral categories to assign to
Israel and Hamas. No matter how many rockets are launched or civilians
murdered, the terrorists in Gaza are the freedom fighters and the Jews
are the oppressors — just like the French in Algeria and the cowboys on
the Great Plains. One suspects that whitewashing Israel helps some
Westerners assuage their post-colonial guilt. By decrying the Jewish
state, they expurgate the sins of their own ancestors and clean their
moral slate.

But when you see blacks and whites, Jews and Arabs
standing side by side against Hamas’s terrorism, it becomes difficult to
call Israel a colonialist oppressor or an apartheid state. Instead, we
see the reality of Israel’s existence: It is built on liberal values of
tolerance anathema to its enemy.

I don’t mean to suggest that
there is no friction or disparity between different ethnic groups in
Israel. Israel is not a “post-racial nation” by any means, and outright
discrimination certainly exists — as it does in many countries. Nor does
the fact that the IDF boasts soldiers of every color relieve Israel of
its obligation to fight morally — which it does, at much cost to its men
and women in uniform. But seeing how our media twist themselves into a
post-colonial pretzel only further highlights their consistent bias
against the one democracy in the Middle East.